Published Papers

The School’s research output in the last decade has been both significant and considerable, as testified by our AACSB accreditation in 2011. We take great pride in the fact that our faculty have contributed more than 150 articles to reputed academic and practitioner journals.

In the past few years, ISB faculty members have published over 60 papers in top-tier journals. Our faculty have received numerous coveted research grants awarded by premier academic institutions, research centres, corporate houses and reputed foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, WWF, McCombs School of Business, UT-Austin and others. These awards attest to the scope, depth and impact of the research conducted at the ISB.

Published PapersJain, Tarun. (2017) "Common tongue: The impact of language on educational performance", Journal of Economic History, 77 (2), 473-510Read Abstract >Close >This paper investigates the impact of official language policies on education using state formation in India. Colonial provinces consisted of some districts where the official language matched the district's language and some where it did not. Linguistically mismatched districts have 18.8% lower literacy rates and 27.6% lower college graduation rates, driven by difficulty in acquiring education due to a different medium of instruction in schools. Educational achievement caught up in mismatched districts after the 1956 reorganization of Indian states on linguistic lines, suggesting that political reorganization can mitigate the impact of mismatched language policies.

Published PapersMehra, Amit.,Saha, Rajib. (2017) "Utilizing Public Betas and Free Trials to Launch a Software Product", Production and Operations ManagementRead Abstract >Close >Many software product firms release a public beta prior to launching its product. Public betas are adopted by innovator consumers and firms use free feedback from these consumers to improve the quality of the product. While trying out the public beta, innovators also learn their product preferences accurately. In addition, opinions expressed by the innovators about the software on public forums like blogs, etc., can introduce a perception bias about the product's quality among the imitator consumers. Therefore, there are demand and cost side trade-offs in introducing public betas. In addition to public beta, firms can introduce product trials along with the product. Product trials serve as a learning mechanism for all consumers (innovators and imitators), unlike in the case of public betas where this benefit accrues only to innovators. We examine the firm's optimal strategies to introduce public beta and/or product trial. We show that introducing public beta does not necessarily result in a higher-quality product. However, even when the quality is lower, consumer surplus and social welfare can be higher. Interestingly, while introducing public beta in addition to trial may appear to be optimal, it may not always be so. We show that similar results hold for products with network effects. We also find that even though the marginal value of quality to consumers is higher for products with network effects, the quality of the product can sometimes be lower than the quality in absence of network effects.

Published PapersMurphy, Dermot., Thirumalai, Ramabhadran S. (2017) "Short-Term Return Predictability and Repetitive Institutional Net Order Activity", Journal of Financial Research, 40 (455-477)Centre for Analytical FinanceRead Abstract >Close >Half-hour returns are predictive of same half-hour returns in subsequent days. Using a
unique dataset that provides masked trader identification and trader type, we find that the
half-hour net order submission activity of institutional traders is positively and significantly
associated with same half-hour returns on subsequent days, and that this relationship subsumes
the return predictability in shorter intervals. We hypothesize that institutional net order activity
is predictive of returns either because of repetitive order submission activity across days, or
because of the slow diffusion of information that is initially revealed by institutional traders.
Our evidence supports the former hypothesis.

Published PapersRamaswami N Sridhar, Arunachalam, S. (2016) "Divided Attitudinal Loyalty and Customer Value : Role of Dealers in an Indirect Channel.", Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

Published PapersVoleti, Sudhir., Dr. Seenu Srinivasan, Dr. Pulak Ghosh. (Forthcoming) "An Approach to Improve the Predictive power of Choice - Based Conjoint Analysis", International Journal of Research in Marketing Read Abstract >Close >We propose a method that (i) robustly estimates of consumers’ part-worths, (ii) flexibly and parsimoniously captures respondent heterogeneity based on part-worth estimates, (iii) offers superior predictive power based on holdout sample analysis, within a Choice based Conjoint (CBC) problem context such that the proposed method:
(a) Applies readily to non-metric (discrete choice) data and (b) incorporates the ‘outside option’ or ‘none chosen’ alternative.
We develop an extension of the Bayesian semiparametric Dirichlet process method, called the Mixture of Dirichlet process (MDP) to achieve the objectives of the paper. We demonstrate our model on a set of 5 different CBC datasets having different respondent numbers, product profiles and attributes evaluated. We find the proposed model consistently outperforms the best available benchmarks in fit and predictive validity.